In my second year of teaching, a mentor asked me a seemingly simple question: “How do you know what your students have learned?” I showed her my gradebook, which listed the assignments, quizzes and projects my students completed. “I see...
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It’s time for a more strategic approach to assessment. Schools, school districts and charter management organizations (CMOs) need to take a fresh look at what is measured: which assessments we give, when and why, and how the data are used....
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Race to the Top directed billions of dollars to states in order to put in place college and career ready standards, educator evaluations, data systems and school turnaround strategies. Yet after five years, the work of implementing and sustaining these...
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In some Race to the Top states, too often educators viewed new educator evaluation systems as burdensome mandates whose main purpose was to fire underperformers – and many evaluators lacked the capacity to differentiate ratings and connect evaluation to teacher support.
We’ve long understood that student achievement is tied to teacher quality. And now, it’s becoming clear from both research and practice that teacher quality is directly related to the feedback and support they receive.
In the last four years, 30 states have transformed their teacher evaluation systems to improve student outcomes—and fourteen more are expected to follow suit by 2017. Too often, however, states focus more on the design of the systems than on...
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New York’s Board of Regents met to hammer out regulations for the state’s recently approved legislation to overhaul its teacher evaluation system. Pushed by Governor Andrew Cuomo earlier this year, the legislation called for increasing the weight of student test...
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Local and national educators took on the topics of teacher evaluations and tenure challenges at Tuesday’s education summit hosted by the Platte Institute for Economic Research, an Omaha-based think tank.
A new group billing itself as a “Consumer Reports for school materials” will soon begin posting free online reviews of major textbooks and curricula that purport to be aligned to the Common Core State Standards—an effort, some say, that has...
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A new group billing itself as a “Consumer Reports for school materials” will soon begin posting free online reviews of major textbooks and curricula that purport to be aligned to the Common Core State Standards—an effort, some say, that has...
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